One year later miners look back

June 10, 2008|By JENNIFER THOMAS, Daily American Staff Writer

There are comfortable smiles and more than a few softspoken words, but a year after being trapped in the Quecreek Mine for 77-hours, nine men who once thought their lives were over can now look at every day as a new lease on life.

Invited to reflect on how much life can change in a year, five of the “Queecreek Nine” gathered at the Casebeer Church early in July. The meeting offered two hours to remember and realize just how much life means.

“So much you would have lost - your family, seeing another day, anything,” said crew chief Randy Fogle. “We were going to die. To go from that point to the surface. It’s unbelievable. You can’t even explain it.”

An unexpected rush of water

July 24 was a typical Wednesday evening on the 3 to 11 p.m. shift. But at 8:50 p.m., 18 lives would change forever as a piece of equipment broke through a abandoned mine wall. Suddenly, a 6-by-4 foot hole began to spew water at an alarming pace.

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Mark Popernack, or “Moe” as the guys nicknamed him, was running the miner. He reacted immediately, screaming out to the crew he had hit water.

“It was going so fast it couldn’t spread out,” said Popernack. “I was just praying that it would slow down.”

The water pushed fellow miner Dennis “Harpo” Hall out of the way and continued its wrath, shoving the 50-ton miner eight feet until it blocked the path.

“That’s kind of like a runaway freight train to see something like that first hand in a confined space. That’s pretty awesome I think…” said crew chief Randy Fogle. “It had that much force behind the water we let loose because the hole we broke in was only 6-by-4. And you could stand beside it and it was running three-feet high.”

The first thought was the safety of the other nine miners.

“We were uphill, they were downhill, you knew they were going to get it right away. They didn’t have the option that we did that when we couldn’t get out we could go back up to where we were another 3,000 feet. We had room. We had time, they didn’t,” said Fogle. “Once the water hit them they were going to drown. They couldn’t get away from it. All they had to do was get out.”

Hall raced to the phone to warn them.

“Whenever I made that phone call it seemed like forever to try to get a hold of somebody. It was like a Godsend somebody picked the phone up right away. That’s when I started screaming,” he said.

The second group of men would begin to fight for their lives.

“It took everything they had to get out. We couldn’t make it. But they made it,” said Unger.

“If they were another minute or two later they wouldn’t have made it,” added Popernack.

With them warned, the first crew chose to try to outrun the water.

“I always thought we could get out. That we had a good chance to beat the water, that we had room. Well, messed up on that one,” says Fogle with shrug. That mistake is clearly in the past.

They would be turned back by the rush of water. The focus was now on survival.

“We sort of knew we weren’t going to outrun it, but we had to try,” added Hall. “This was more than just a few hundred gallons - thousand gallons of water.”

Efforts began to construct a barricade of cement blocks. The water lapped at the tips of their toes. By the time they stopped it was at their necks.

“I knew we was in a lot of trouble,” said John Unger. “We thought we had an hour.”

Trapped

The men pushed to 8,000 feet from the surface as the water continued to rise. They prayed for it to stop.

“You had to keep your wits about yourself. I think experience paid off,” said Unger.

There was a simple theory about the group.

“We all go together and we all come out together. That’s how we do things,” he said.

Fogle said the men knew they had dipped into an abandoned mine, later identified as the Saxman Mine. There were brief moments of hope the mine wasn’t large. That thought sparks laughter among the men, as Robert “Boogie” Pugh Jr. explains the logic behind the laughs.

“Old timers didn’t cut in so deep,” he said, admitting he thought it would just run for a couple hours and quit. He had no idea they had tapped into seven miles of water.

“I figured it would stop in a couple hours and we’d just have to be late going home,” he said.

Today, almost a year after the fact, the idea that they were going to be a little late seems almost absurd to the men. It appears the length of their stay is amusing as everyone interjects a quick jab at Pugh.

“Yeah, we was late” is quickly followed by “My wife waited up.”

Then there is a serious answer.

“I never thought it’d be that long,” said Unger.

Fogle had a feeling though as the men prepared for the worst.

“I realized this was really going to be a long time,” he said.

Popernack snapped off his head lamp, knowing light may be crucial later. Checks of the water dimmed their hopes.